


Sublimation

by roane



Series: Defence Mechanisms [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Explicit Consent, F/M, First Time, Jealousy, M/M, Science, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 18:26:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roane/pseuds/roane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sub·li·ma·tion  [suhb-luh-mey-shuhn]:<br/>1. Psychology. the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use.<br/>2. Chemistry. the act, fact, or process of converting a solid substance into a vapour through the application of heat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Diversion

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Restricted Work] by [Toootie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toootie/pseuds/Toootie). Log in to view. 



> Thanks as always to redrosehoofbeats and emmadelosnardos, my awesome betas. Emma helps me get the science straight. Any mistakes are mine and not hers.
> 
> This opens with the same opening scene as "Displacement" from Sherlock's point of view, and goes forward from there.

**sub·li·ma·tion** [suhb-luh- **mey** -shuhn]: 

  1. Psychology. the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. 
  2. Chemistry. the act, fact, or process of converting a solid substance into a vapour through the application of heat. 



 

Adrenaline is still flowing from the case, from solving the case, running yellow-red flashes through his blood. The last three days have been nothing but the mind, locked up inside himself and coming out only to bounce the sound of his voice at John. Sherlock's voice is grey, but when it comes back to him from John, it brightens to blue. John's voice is orange-gold. This is how Sherlock always hears him.

He hears tension in John's footsteps as they climb the stairs to the flat. He suspects he is the cause, but isn't sure why. He feels the presence of John pressing around him and against his skin like swaddling. It's a feeling he's coming to associate with home.

So when John leaves a few minutes later, it's unsettling.

Then, unsettled by being unsettled, Sherlock flips through his latest set of notes to find where he left off, and begins pulling unspeakable things from the refrigerator.

John returns five hours and seven minutes later and he smells wrong. He smells _wrong_. Sherlock can smell a woman's perfume, and more, the rank hormonal smell of sex. His insides curl around themselves and he doesn't look at John, exchanging meaningless words as he studies a journal article on molecular biology.

He doesn't sleep until nearly daybreak, thinking of cells dividing and multiplying. Thinking of nuclei and RNA and DNA, transcription and epigenetic modifications. He does not think about orange-gold voices that smell like someone else.

 

Sherlock hears his mobile ring at 2:42 in the afternoon, but doesn't move. John's been awake for twenty-eight minutes, so he can answer it. The bed is too comfortable, sheets still just crisp enough to rustle against his skin. He turns the pillow over to the cool side and settles back against it, arms curling up around it.

John says, “Sherlock's still sleeping.”

He closes his eyes and tries to sink into the mattress entirely. It's possible he hasn't fully recovered from three days without sleep.

“Bad?” John's tone falls on Sherlock's ear like a familiar passage of music. There's tension in his voice, but excitement as well, turning it to shades of crimson. Siren song of the battlefield.

“Yeah, hang on.” John pauses. “Can I call you back? This could get ugly.” 

Sherlock should get up. But he doesn't want to. He closes his eyes and stills his breathing, mimicking the deep and even rhythm of sleep.

John knocks at his door. “Sherlock. It's Lestrade, he's got a case.” He knocks once more, then Sherlock hears the bedroom door open. He hears each step, he hears the hesitation in them and wonders at it.

Then John touches his bare shoulder and it's all he can do not to tense. It starts as a shake, but lingers—not long, just a few seconds too long. His hand is cool against Sherlock's skin, soothing, like aloe applied to a sunburn. John's breathing shallows, but Sherlock doesn't think John realizes. John shakes him once more, and Sherlock says, “I'm awake.” He turns against the pillow to look up at John—neat, unrumpled John—who has a crease between his eyebrows as if he's thinking hard. “Coffee?” Sherlock murmurs.

“Right. Get dressed. I'll make some.” His bearing is military upright as he leaves.

 

The case is gory, but far too obvious. Sherlock suspects Lestrade called him only because Anderson didn't want to deal with the mess.

The case isn't enough. It isn't enough to keep him from thinking that John is being distant. It isn't enough to keep him from wondering who the woman was, and what she means.

It isn't enough to keep him from hearing the pale yellow lie in John's voice when he says he'll be visiting his sister that night.

It isn't enough.

 

He spends the night in his chair by the hearth, hands steepled before him. This is a puzzle, and like all puzzles, if he’s given enough time he can solve it. John is running from him, and Sherlock wants to know why. It started after the departure of John's last girlfriend, whatever-her-name-was. John doesn't know it, but Sherlock has seen how John looks at him sometimes, his eyes full of something like despair. 

Sherlock knows he frightens people. He didn't think John would ever be one of those people. People are afraid of his mind, but they don't understand. His mind developed the way it did because it had to. Sherlock's senses are acute, but he's had them tested, and they fall well within the range of the human norm. Not super-human. They just never stop working. As a child in school, he was regularly reprimanded for taking off parts of his uniform: tie, coat, socks. He couldn't seem to make anyone understand that the scratchy wool was driving him mad, really, truly mad. His research suggests that the average mind can filter out stimuli when necessary—the scratch of a wool suit coat, for example. Sherlock can't. There is never a moment he is not maddeningly aware of the pressure of clothing, the temperature of the air against his skin, the constant drone of traffic in Baker Street below. Nothing ever fades into the background. Developing his powers of observation was the only way he had to keep from wandering the world drowning in sensory stimuli. He knows how to sort out the important from the unimportant, the relevant from the irrelevant, and it frustrates him that no one else seems to understand the difference.

The drugs helped. Cocaine in particular, gave him a sense of focus he'd never found before. Even after years of not using, he thinks of the orderly way coke made his thoughts march past him with an aching, longing twist in his stomach.

Then John walked into the laboratory at St. Bart's. The rush wasn't as palpable as cocaine. It was subtler. But Sherlock had that same sensation of his thoughts falling into a queue, as if John had given them the order to march. So he did what he had to do to keep John in his life, to fuse him into the pattern of his life. The thought of John pulling free, leaving him behind with the noise in his head, makes it hard for Sherlock to breathe.

And so he watches through the night, trying to solve the puzzle before time runs out.

 

By the time John returns home, Sherlock thinks he may be close to an answer.

“Morning,” John says. “Get my text?” He's showered, but Sherlock imagines he can still smell the woman and it's as maddening as scratchy wool.

“Yes. And how is Harry?” The gall of the lie, the green-yellow lie. _Why are you lying, John?_ Sherlock feels sick and helpless and while the feelings are novel, he could have done without the experience.

“Fine. She's fine. Listen, have we got anything on for today? I was thinking we could--”

“John.” He's had enough. “Where you spend your nights and who you spend them with is none of my concern.” The lie in his own voice is a pallid grey-green. “Do not, however, think you can deceive me about it. Don't ever think you're capable of that.”

“Not—I'm not..? You don't know what I'm capable of.” John steps toward him, hands curled as if offering violence. “You—you utter prick. You know, despite what you think, you don't know everything there is to know about me. I don't care if you are the magnificent Sherlock fucking Holmes. You have a blind spot so fucking complete you don't even know it's there, and there are parts of me that just vanish behind it.”

“John, I--” What? How is he planning to finish that sentence? _I'm sorry, don't leave me?_

“Sod off,” John says, and slams his way up the stairs to his room.

 

He apologizes days later, in the back seat of a cab heading for another crime scene. He hadn't planned to, but John's silence is sandpaper against his skin. When John receives the twenty-third text message since the morning he came home from a woman's bed, Sherlock can take no more. 

“John?”

He starts up from his phone violently, turning it so quickly away from Sherlock that he nearly drops it. “Hm?”

“I just wanted to say... I'm—that is, you were right. I do underestimate you at times. That's...” _stupid, idiotic, moronic_ “...foolish of me.” Sherlock focuses on John, but his eyes are drawn to the image reflected in the taxi window. He can't see details, but the photograph on John's phone is clearly a naked figure, logic suggests it's the woman John has been seeing.

“Sherlock, are you trying to apologise to me?”

He tears his eyes away from trying to glean clues about his rival. “Yes. That's it. I apologise. For, for underestimating you.”

John relaxes against the bench seat, and for a moment, sounds like this usual orange-gold self. “That's all right then.”

 

When John goes out that night, Sherlock is prepared. He's set himself a difficult task, one that requires delicacy, finesse, and absolute concentration. The eyeballs that he's gotten from Molly are all in perfect and varying states of putrefaction, and he wants to study and catalogue the differences in the cellular structure of each one. If he's thorough, he may manage to avoid sleep entirely.

He's carefully slivering off a bit of tissue from the eighth specimen when his phone beeps. He reaches with one hand to flick through texts. Mycroft. _**Check your email.**_ Sherlock drops the phone to the table and goes back to his work. He's carefully mounting the tissue on a slide when it beeps again. He should ignore it, but doesn't. Irritation is almost as good a distraction as work. Mycroft again: _**It's to do with John.**_

How like Mycroft, to bait the trap with something so obvious. How unlike himself, to walk into it so readily. He fixes the slide plate and goes over to John's laptop on the desk. 

The email is short and to the point: _You need to have a talk with John._ There is a video attached. Curiosity compels him to click and open the file. CCTV coverage. Sherlock doesn't recognize the corner immediately—there's nothing distinctive about it, just another London street corner with brick walls and alleyways.

Until John walks on to the scene hand-in-hand with—Sherlock doesn't know how to describe what he's seeing. It's _her_ , that much is clear. He studies her as closely as he can, and Mycroft's hidden camera operator obliges him by zooming in on the couple. She's tall, nearly as tall as he is himself. Dark hair, wavy and not over-long. Dyed, clearly. Fair complexion otherwise. The resemblance to himself is unmistakable—heightened by the fact that she's clearly dressed in a masculine fashion. More specifically, she's dressed like _him_. John's expression suggests that he's drunk, but Sherlock can tell from his gait that he's not.

Adrenaline floods his body, speeding up his heart rate and making it difficult to breathe. Fight, flight, or something else entirely? Instead of passing from the frame of the picture, the woman grabs John roughly—Sherlock has a moment of outrage, how dare she—and backs him against the alley wall. When she starts to kiss him, Sherlock reaches for the mouse with a hand that barely trembles, but ultimately he can't stop the video.

He tries to detach, to observe. John is clearly uncertain at first, but when the woman moves her mouth down his throat, his mind changes. _Interesting_. More interesting—he can see nothing of the woman but her back, and little of John but his face. _Mycroft you bastard, why did you send me this?_ But he knows why. _You need to have a talk with John._

Sherlock watches John's face on his screen, John's face with its eyes closed and mouth slightly open. Their hands are hidden beneath the woman's coat—Sherlock's coat—but Sherlock's imagination supplies the details. He can't breathe. It's the adrenaline, the norepinephrine, chemicals in his bloodstream over which he has no control, speeding up his heart and respiration, sending blood rushing through his body at an entirely unnecessary pace. He isn't in danger here, for all his body thinks he is.

Another shift in movements on the screen—something has surprised John, and frightened him, to judge by the sudden tension in his shoulders. Sherlock watches them study each other before something is decided and this time it's John that's kissing her, and Sherlock can't see their hands, but there's no mistaking the hip movements. Are they—no, not that, their movements are too unsynchronized, and the height difference would make it impossible standing up, but... think, damn it, think. But he can't think. He can't hear John, the ambient traffic noise is too loud, but he can imagine it, the vermilion sounds coming from that open mouth. He can only watch chemical reactions spark expressions on John's face over the woman's shoulder. He has never, in all of his life, hated chemistry more than he does at that moment.

It happens sooner than he expected—sooner than John expected too, to judge by his look of surprise and embarrassment—but it does happen, and now Sherlock knows how John looks in the throes of an orgasm. The knowledge is bitterer than he would have expected.

He watches the clip three more times, memorizing each expression on John's face. The capillaries in his face are dilated, suffusing cheeks with colour and warmth. Sherlock knows the same reaction is his right now, flushed and breathless. As the couple walks out of frame hand-in-hand for the fourth time, Sherlock comes back to his senses. He snaps the window closed and closes the computer, turning away to scrub at his face with his hands, focusing on the feeling of stubble against fingers, fingers against stubble, focusing on the _here_ and the _now_. He takes a deep breath against the adrenaline, and stands, determined to return to his work.

 

He's typing his notes up on John's computer, detailing cellular breakdown at one week, two weeks, but another part of his mind is rehearsing what to do when John comes home. He expects a long night's wait, he expects a text from John telling him that he'll be out all night.

He doesn't expect what happens next.

John returns hours earlier than he would have thought, freshly showered, smelling of someone else's soap. Sherlock reacts quickly, wanting some way to bring him closer, to bring him within arm's reach to—what exactly he doesn't know, but he wants John near. “John, you're back. Good. Can you hand me the--”

“Shut up,” John says, and the next moment his hands are tangled in Sherlock's hair, pulling his head back, burning his scalp, a low fierce burn that makes him want to give in and fight back simultaneously. Then John's mouth is on his, closed but soft, lips moving the smallest fraction. _Oh._ Before Sherlock has time to reach for him to return the gesture, he's gone. Before Sherlock can say anything, John has left the room.


	2. Vapour

_He won't follow me. He won't._

John isn't sure if that disappoints him or is a relief. His head is spinning from the evening: Maggie, dressed as Sherlock. Maggie cracking him wide open and letting the thing he most feared spill out. And then sending him home to face his fear. “You think it's just you,” she said, “but you're wrong. I saw that picture in the _Sun_. He's looking at you like you're a mouthwatering Sunday roast and he hasn't eaten in days.”

So John came home and kissed Sherlock. Just the once. And then fled like a coward. Now he sits on the edge of his bed and tries to decide if he wants to hear footsteps on the stairs or not. He's thinking it so hard that when the sound comes, he can't figure out if it's real or just in his fevered brain.

John stands up. Facing Sherlock while sitting on his bed sounds like a horrible idea. Sherlock appears in his doorway and doesn't look at John. “That was... unexpected,” he says.

“Got your attention, anyway.”

“And was that what you wanted? My attention?” He looks up at John with those damned unearthly unsettling eyes.

“I...” John licks his lips. “I don't know. Maybe.”

“Why?” Sherlock hasn't moved across the threshold, but is standing in the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back. John steps toward him. It's not a large room. Two steps is enough to halve the distance.

“What _are_ we, Sherlock? Really? I follow you around and you... you stare at me just like you're doing right now.” He's moving forward without planning to. “ _What are we?_ ” They're standing nearly chest-to-chest now, John with his chin jutted out like a challenge, Sherlock cool and impassive.

“You tell me,” Sherlock says, watching the micro-expressions on John's face. “What does your latest girlfriend have to say about it?”

“She's not—it's not like that.”

“What is it like, then?” Sherlock's looming, possibly without meaning to, his voice dropping pitch and volume in the stillness of the room. “I find myself overwhelmingly curious.”

John breaks the gaze and the slight movement in his shoulders suggests that he's about to turn away, and Sherlock doesn't want that. He catches John's chin in his fingers and turns him back. “I know about her, John. I've seen--” he catches himself from saying 'a video', that's too much “--photographs.”

“How the fuck did you--” John does pull away at that, but he doesn't go far. “Mycroft?”

Sherlock nods.

“Jesus Christ.” It fascinates Sherlock, it will never cease to fascinate Sherlock, how quickly John can shift between emotions. Anger, embarrassment, anger again. “I'm sorry. It—it wasn't intentional. I mean, I didn't set out to shag someone who looks like--” He runs his hand through his hair and turns away, blowing out his breath. “That was... creepy of me. I'm sorry. If you want me to go, I'll understand.”

Sherlock waits, and lets John pace the room. “Why would I want that?”

John stops pacing and looks up at Sherlock, hand paused at the back of his head, mid-ruffle. “Why would you—Jesus, Sherlock. Why _wouldn't_ you?”

For the first time in days, Sherlock feels something approximating control. He, after all, has a clear picture of the situation. John does not. “Why wouldn't I?” He repeats the question, turning it back on the asker. “Think it through, John.”

“Oh this is hardly the time for deductions--”

“No, this is exactly the time, John. You know me better than anyone. Open your eyes and _look_.”

John's spine straightens, the military falling across his shoulders again. Sherlock wonders if he realizes he still does it. He wonders if it's a mask. Then John steps forward, studying Sherlock from head to toe. John actually walks a circle around him. Normally Sherlock can read the tension in any room like a book—who the main players are, how the plot is likely to turn out—but this is written in a language he has never bothered to learn. So he stays very still, hands clasped loosely behind his back. Only when John's eyes come back to his face does John begin to speak. “Maybe you find it flattering,” he says. “Maybe you're amused to learn that I find you...” Sherlock watches him grasp for the right word “...attractive, for all my protesting. But then again...” John takes a purposeful step forward, his eyes fixed to Sherlock's. “Maybe it's something else entirely. Your pupils are dilated, did you know?”

“So are yours,” Sherlock murmurs.

“Yeah well, we're not talking about me right now, are we?” He moves snake-quick and takes Sherlock's wrist in his left hand. “Let's see.” John cups Sherlock's hand in his right and turns it over, pressing his fingers against the radial artery. “Pulse elevated.”

“Yes, I'm well-acquainted with the effects of neurochemicals on the body.” Speaking has become more difficult. All Sherlock can focus on is the warmth of John's hand beneath his, the sharp tickle of John's fingertips brushing across his palm. He tries to still his breathing and fails.

“Sherlock... you were—you _are_ —turned on by this.” The lemon-yellow wonder in John's voice makes Sherlock want to kiss him. 

“It would appear so.”

John laughs, not a low sultry chuckle, but a boyishly exuberant bark. “ _Why?_ ” And there's the crux of it. John still doesn't understand.

“You idiot.” Sherlock reaches for John then, taking his face between his hands and pulling him closer. “You kissed me, and I followed you up to your bedroom. _Think it through_.” And then, oh then, his mouth is on John's, and it's not soft and it's not tender but it's so, so necessary. He hears John make a muffled sound—of surprise or protest, he can't tell which—before yielding and putting his hands on Sherlock's waist.

The kiss moves in waves, swelling with intensity and depth, fading back to nearly nothing before rising again. For Sherlock, every other sensation backgrounds itself to the kiss, movement of mouth on mouth, tongue slipping against tongue, the feeling of his hands on John's face. And _that_ is what Sherlock's been hoping for, that grounding sensation. He has a flash of recall, remembering what he saw the woman in the video do to John and the reaction it engendered. His mouth leaves John's and he moves a hand to John's shoulder, letting his mouth trace down the other man's neck.

John gasps and pulls back, his eyes wide and so grey-blue, the only trace of coolness in his face.

“What?” Sherlock says, “I thought you liked that.”

“You thought I--” John's laugh is nervous this time. “I do. Sherlock, what are we _doing_?”

“Kissing.”

“Yes, I know, you're the genius for a reason. Why? Why are we kissing?”

Sherlock doesn't think that's the real question. He thinks the real question might be more, _Sherlock, why are you kissing_ me? This isn't how this was supposed to go. Weren't they supposed to be swept away? “You don't want to?”

“Well yes, I started it, so obviously--”

“I did assume that if you were sleeping with women who look like me--”

“Oh _god_ , can we please not talk about that right now.” 

Sherlock pulls John back towards him and wraps an arm around his waist. Lowering his lips to brush against John's temple, he lowers his voice to a deliberate, soft growl. “Why are we talking at all?”

The response from John is quite satisfying: a startled jerk throughout his body, followed by a slow shiver. “But--”

“Shut up.” This time it's Sherlock who stops any further discussion, taking John's mouth once more. It's softer this time, but no less urgent. It's only a moment before John's hands are tangled in his hair again, pulling him down, pulling him closer. Sherlock tightens both arms around John's waist, bending him slightly backwards. He's fought this for so long, not wanting the distraction, not wanting a distastefully messy entanglement. Now he can't get close enough.

He nudges John backwards, peeking with his peripheral vision to make sure he's going to hit his target. The backs of John's knees bump against the bed and his eyes fly wide mid-kiss, but he lets Sherlock lay him down and join him on the bed.

He sprawls half atop John and their mouths meet with a new urgency. Sherlock loses some of his focus and it's maddening: the whisper of fabric against fabric as John moves against the duvet, against Sherlock; the sound of their breathing reminiscent of the last time they were running side by side through the streets; John beneath him, John-who-doesn't-smell-like-John. He's too warm, too constricted. Sherlock tears at the front of his shirt, heedless of the buttons, then stops, pausing to consider how to remove John's jumper without breaking the kiss. Short of cutting it off of him—which does seem like a viable option for a second or two—he gives it up as a bad job and settles for sliding his hands beneath the warm wool. John's skin is warm, the same warm colours as his voice. His stomach muscles flutter satisfactorily under Sherlock's fingers as he pushes the jumper further and further up John's chest.

Only then does he lift his mouth from John's, who fights him for a moment, trying to keep him where he is. He stops fighting when Sherlock lowers his mouth to his golden-warm chest, lips moving from one nipple to the other as he pushes the jumper up and over John's head. As soon as the fabric falls away, John's hands come back to tug at Sherlock's hair, and his back arches towards Sherlock's mouth. Then Sherlock's able to finish undoing his own buttons. He can't wait long enough to actually shrug the shirt from his shoulders, and instead just reaches for John's mouth again, lowering his body until they're skin-to-skin.

And everything snaps into focus again. There's just one sensation, and that sensation is John. John warm and alive and moving, John breathing, John making small intoxicating noises as Sherlock climbs over to straddle his hips. The world goes blessedly narrow. John's hands move from his hair to his back, moving with slow, tentative strokes. Sherlock doesn't understand the hesitation—given their current positions, his own growing arousal must be apparent. John's certainly is.

Minutes go by, endless minutes of mouth against mouth, stroking hands. If not for that persistent and growing biological need—useless really, the drive for reproduction has no place here—Sherlock would be almost content to go no further. Almost. Curiosity and need drive him to push a little more. He raises his hips and trails his fingers down John's chest to the waistband of his jeans. He pulls back from John's mouth and gives him a questioning look, hand hovering at the top button.

The nod is a familiar one—short, barely more than a meeting of the eyes. It says _yes, I trust you_. It says _yes, I'll follow you in this_. How many times has he seen it, since that night in the sports centre by the pool? When did he earn such utter, implicit trust? For a heartbeat, he is terrified. This is an experiment, and experiments regularly fail. That's the point of experiments, to test a hypothesis. When an experiment failed, you altered your hypothesis and moved on to the next one. Can he alter this hypothesis? If this experiment fails, if the bond can’t hold when heat is applied, what would it mean?

After several breaths, he starts to unbutton. John isn't fully hard—given his age and the evening's presumptive earlier activities, Sherlock isn't surprised. They watch each other, and slowly, carefully, Sherlock curls his fingers around John's cock. 

“God.” A short, reverent rush of air from John.

“Do you want this?” He feels compelled to ask, to be sure, before crossing a boundary that can't be uncrossed. John nods again, slowly. “No. Tell me. I need to hear you say it.”

“Yes,” John says. “I want this. I want you. But--”

Sherlock withdraws his hand immediately. “But?”

“No, come back.” John laughs, a little shaky. “It's been a—oh _hell_ —it was a busy evening. And I'm not twenty any more.”

Sherlock leans down and kisses him again, finding him again with his fingers. “We'll have to see what comes up.”

John groans and it doesn't sound like pleasure, as it's followed by a giggle. “That's _terrible_.” 

After a moment, Sherlock adds his own low chuckle. “Unintentional, but yes.”

The giggle fades away from John, his eyes shifting a shade darker. “Jesus. That laugh. Come here.” He pulls Sherlock down to him, rising to meet him halfway. The mood shifts, as do their bodies, and Sherlock finds himself half on his side with John's teeth at his neck and John's hand sliding over the front of his trousers. It's his turn to give assent, and he does it before even asked, a sibilant “Yes.”

It's been so long, so stupidly long, the part of himself he put away when he put away cocaine, the rejection of everything to do with the corporeal, not trusting himself not to wallow in it. He wants to wallow in this, to give up and give over, to surrender himself to this man. John's hand wrapped gently around him, starting to stroke, as steady and sure as the man himself. And it has been so stupidly long since he's done this. Sherlock tries to hold on to thought but can't, back to the one sensation that is John. He tries to return some of the pleasure he's receiving and can't, can't focus on more than one thing. John lays him back and draws out of Sherlock's reach, leaving Sherlock to close his fist around the duvet. John's lips at his ear murmuring for him to let go. It's too soon, much too soon, but John's hand is warm and firm and just damp enough and oh god.

Blinding flashes starburst across his vision and his brain—that overactive, overclocked machine—goes offline. Sherlock doesn't know if he cries out or if the sound is only in his mind as he jerks and shudders and spurts messily over John's hand. John's voice filling his head, “God, you're beautiful.”

When his body stills, John draws him into his arms, ignoring the mess, bringing them chest to chest again, on their sides. Sherlock presses his flushed cheeks into John's shoulder and tries to re-assimilate himself. When he starts to shake in the aftermath, violent tremors throughout his body, John pulls him tighter. “Okay?” he asks, pulling away to meet his eyes.

“Yes,” Sherlock answers. “No. Oh, John.” He can't explain, how can he, all the bad old habits just lying there waiting to be picked up. Begging to be picked up. Awake again for the first time in years. “Don't let me go. Just stay with me.” He know John's worried, can feel it in the new tension in his arms. “Stay with me until I fall asleep.”

“I'm staying right here, Sherlock.” John kisses his temple and settles in next to him. “For as long as you want. I'm not going anywhere.”

Sherlock clings to him for nearly an hour, letting himself be soothed as he has never done before. John never asks, he never pushes. If John had pushed, it would have easy for Sherlock to push back. To get up. To leave. To fall. Maybe John understands more than Sherlock thinks--they both have their demons. But John is just John: the anchor. Finally the worst of the reawakened craving passes and Sherlock can fade into restless sleep.


End file.
